Every day brings news of another pharma or biotech company joining the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. According to some reports over two hundred vaccines are currently in development...

A leading independent technology innovation centre and founding member of the UK government’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult has appointed life sciences law firm Hill Dickinson to its legal framework panel.

The NHS placing rules are well known. They are ’anti-dumping’ rules which are supposed to prevent a CCG from ‘placing’ an expensive patient, such as a patient with a costly NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC) package, in the area of another CCG, waiting until the patient changes registration to a local GP in a new area and then saying that the change of GP registration means a change in the responsible commissioner for other NHS services. The consequence of this is that a CCG has moved an expensive patient off its books and landed another CCG with the on-going costs.

In this article, Sir David Dalton talks to Jamie Foster, partner in our Health team, on his views of the impact of COVID-19 on the NHS, and the future for healthcare after the crisis. The key points of their discussion are recorded here:

Global healthcare communications agency Fishawack Health has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by international investment firm Bridgepoint, marking a successful exit for the company’s previous mid-market private equity investor, LDC. 

Following the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in June 2017, Dame Judith Hackett led an independent review of building regulations and fire safety, which identified a number of issues in the way some high-rise residential properties are built, managed and looked after. 

To ensure that healthcare providers can work together effectively to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, an order has been made to exclude certain arrangements within the healthcare sector from Chapter 1 of the Competition Act 1998. The Chapter 1 provision would normally prohibit agreements, which have the object or effect of restricting competition in the UK. 

NHS England/NHS Improvement have issued guidance on arrangements for contracting and payment, both within the NHS and with independent sector providers, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The guidance follows on from the letter sent to NHS bodies by Sir Simon Stevens and Amanda Pritchard on 17 March. The intention of the guidance is to provide certainty that payments for services under the NHS standard contract will continue to be paid during a designated period of April to July 2020; and to enable staff focus on the pandemic response by minimising the burden of formal contract documentation and contract management. 

In a judgment that has the potential for far-reaching implications for the dental profession and how NHS dental services are provided, in Ramdhean -v- Agedo (1) The Forum Dental Practice Limited (2) [2020] (unreported), the dental practice has been found to owe a non-delegable duty of care to an NHS patient and be vicariously liable for the associate dentist’s treatment.

Our firm represented Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust in its application to lawfully make arrangements for a child (M) to have his mechanical ventilation treatment withdrawn, where clinical testing had confirmed that he met the criteria for brain stem death. The child’s parents contested the application, arguing that the tests were invalid.

The article was authored by David Locke, partner in Hill Dickinson's health litigation team, and first appeared in New Law Journal on 30 January 2020 and is reproduced here with kind permission.

The report following the inquiry into the actions taken by Ian Paterson was published on Tuesday 4 February 2020. In April 2017, Ian Paterson was convicted of 17 counts of wounding with intent and three counts of unlawful wounding. He was given a prison sentence of 15 years that was increased to 20 years in August 2017. The factual background to the events leading up to the conviction are well known and not rehearsed here. The inquiry did not focus on the offences themselves, rather, the inquiry considered how it was possible that the so called ‘rogue surgeon’ was able to commit so many offences apparently undetected while ‘hiding in plain sight’.